Katie Holmes on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' on Tom Cruise, Suri and her role as Jackie K. in 'The Kennedys,' which I like

ABC-TV video: Katie Holmes on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Part I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3WBAfYKy2E

I watched this LIVE the other night/morning and thought that Katie Holmes acquitted herself quite well and came across -as usual- as very likable and thoughtful, just as she always has in the past, starting when I first came to know her character of Joey Potter on Dawson's Creek.

Watching this interview and Jimmy Kimmel's emphasis on her husband Tom Cruise and her daughter Suri, I actually thought back to the Rolling Stone interview I first read back in 1998, where in reading about her sweet, earnest Midwestern ethos, she seemed, well, almost too-bright and too-good for Hollywood.
Almost too good to be true.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/photos/more-katie-holmes-20010125

It could hardly be clearer that she has put in a tremendous amount of hard work, deep thinking and research into her acting for this mini-series as well as carefully considered the answers she'd give after playing such an iconic American for whom so many people of a certain age still have such very strong feelings about.

In the hands of someone else, this is a role that could easily have been a caricature, and simply played itself out as a fashion show with a gorgeous Katie acting as a mannequin.

But to her credit, and that of the writers and producers and other actors, having watched this program every night from the beginning on The Reelz Channel, once you get used to her in the outfits, rather than her being played cute, coy or insufferable, she comes across as someone who was neither naive or a push-over.

From my point of view, it's really been quite good, and I say that as someone who had already read all the classic JFK books by the time I was out of NMB High School, including the William Manchester and Jim Bishop books.
I've had the Seymour Hersh book, The Dark Side of Camelot, since it came out as a paperback, and re-read parts of it last week in preparing to watch the series before it started a few days ago.

As I've mentioned here previously, my parents saw President & Mrs. Kennedy the day before Dallas, when they flew into San Antonio's Kelly AFB, where my parents both worked, when my father was in the Air Force and my mother was the Base Commander's secretary.
(I was born next-door at the Lackland AFB hospital.)

Like so many others on the base, they watched them nearby on the tarmac as the two of them went thru the receiving line after getting off of Air Force One.
And that wonderful photo of them, taken by the base photographer, more than any great iconic photo that you can probably think of, is THE photo that my two sisters and I grew-up with of the Kennedy's.
It's the one that, quite literally, has been in my head since I could remember anything.

Personally, I'd love to share that 'family' photo with you all, but the moment I do that, I know that it will soon be "lifted," probably within an hour, and immediately used for some purpose for which it was NOT intended -and the photographer would never get the proper credit.

There's a LOT of that going on in the blogosphere and on the Internet, some of it much closer to home in South Florida than you may think.



ABC-TV video: Katie Holmes on Jimmy Kimmel Live, PART 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI32sZWwCSg




ABC-TV video: Katie Holmes on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI32sZWwCSg

Reelz Channel will be airing the first six episodes on both Saturday and Sunday - Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. The final two episodes airing on Sunday at 8 p.m., with an encore at 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.
http://www.reelzchannel.com/kennedys/

Losing our cultural & literary heritage, bit-by-bit: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

I have a ton of material to drop here over the next ten days or so that I couldn't post when it originally happened or occurred to me, due to some recent computer problems, so if some of this seems a bit old, it can't be helped.

Still, I suspect that if you're one of my usual discerning readers, you'll still appreciate that the facts are what is most important, not when you found out about it.

Today, much later than I originally planned, I'm initiating a new recurring feature on this blog that I believe will largely speak for itself, though I will likely have some comments anyway: "Losing our cultural & literary heritage, bit-by-bit."

Everything else being equal, the feature will be about the very idea that some important aspects of our collective history and culture are continually being miscast, misinterpreted or "misremembered," to use the word that Roger Clemens used so famously.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3243636

Sometimes that happens by accident or mistake, of course, but at other times, when I think it's being done intentionally and disingenuously to advance a particular point of view, especially a political one, I'll write here about why I think someone's mendaciously trying to blur the facts that we should all be familiar with.
At least, those of us paying attention to what's going on around us -and history.

And do I ever have a lot of ammunition for this new feature, too, a lot of it political. I welcome suggestions from readers who want more people to know what they've discovered to their dismay.

In this particular case today, how does the New York Times forget something so important to our understanding about Huck Finn, since Widow Douglas was one of the few people in the story whose opinion of him actually mattered to Huck?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/pageoneplus/corrections.html

New York Times
Corrections
September 23, 2010

THE ARTS

A critic’s notebook on Saturday about an exhibition on Mark Twain at the Morgan Library & Museum, and the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, misidentified the home in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” where Huck felt discomfort. It was Widow Douglas’s — not Aunt Polly’s, where Tom Sawyer lived.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/books/18twain.html

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"My Huckleberry friend..."

Only one of the greatest songs ever: Moon River, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, music by Henry Mancini.
Appearing in one of my favorite films: Breakfast at Tiffany's, which I've seen dozens of times.
Sung by one of my favorite actresses: Audrey Hepburn, whose every film I've seen at least once, and many of them, dozens of times, like my personal favorite, Funny Face, with Fred Astaire.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050419/


Breakfast at Tiffany's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOByH_iOn88



When Moon River came on during a crucial character development scene in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July, when Tom Cruise's Ron Kovic was running in the rain to be at the high school prom with Kyra Segdwick's Donna, I actually started crying in the movie theater. (For the record, at an absolutely jammed Saturday afternoon performance at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., about the tenth row, right in the middle.)
It was movie magic -perfect!
Actual genius!

That great scene I've described is in the first video clip below.

Born on The Fourth of July
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCe4Uym0pfU


That's the thing about film director and political provocateur Oliver Stone.
He really, really, really knows how to manipulate you -even when you know he is.
But his politics aside, there's no denying his genius talent.

That's Stone at 4:58 in the video above as the reporter interviewing the general about how he thinks the Americans will do in Vietnam.
Stone won the Academy Award for Best Directing for the film, which also earned Tom Cruise an Oscar Best Acting nomination, and deservedly so for both of them.
It's a classic piece of film-making that remains gripping.

Here's the classic version of Moon River that you hear in both films.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xNgBLCfmpg


And here's the thing: I thought about ALL of this in the first few seconds after I saw that New York Times correction in the newspaper, while sipping my coffee over at Panera Bread.
That's how my mind works.